For A Moment Like a Lonely Island
It started when Ken realized that the vast majority of his interactions had moved online. He sent all his work in via email, his social communities were in online gaming, and his family talked through a complicted web of chat messages, photo apps, and video messages.
At the start of the new year, Ken made a resolution to be more time efficient. Contrary to previous years, he put this resolution into action, and took a long look at his daily life, work life, and regular habits.
——
In his quest to save time, Ken soon found that correspondence was a huge time commitment.
Emails were a craft, especially when they needed to sound heartfelt. Chat messages required an ongoing level of shallow investment, however minimal. Chatting between games online often took up more time than the gaming itself. Also, Ken’s mother hated it when he didn’t reply within a day.
So Ken began looking for ways to automate his correspondence.
——
The chatbot program seemed simple enough: after installation, and given enough time, it would learn to talk as he did.
For the first week, it did nothing, and Ken quickly forgot he had bought it.
During the second week, however, the chatbot began offering suggestions for finishing the sentences Ken was writing. A few words here, a few words there; simple snippets Ken could approve quickly to save a few seconds per email.
By the third week, the chatbot was providing suggestions for how to begin messages, along with potential follow-up sentences and options for politely leaving conversations when the timing was right.
By the end of the month, the chatbot was almost completely able to predict the correct responses to incoming text messages and write whole emails based on a past history with the correspondent, or by scanning messages with similar people.
The greater part of Ken’s time was beginning to free up.
——
There were, of course, parts of the chatbot that needed tinkering, polish, and fine tuning. Over the course of a week, Ken separated the entirety of his correspondence into categories: family, social, work, romance, new clients, formal occasions; the list went on.
Looking at the list of chatbot versions was interesting. The program essentially revealed that Ken’s own personality was reflected in the patterns that occurred as a result of specific spheres of conversation. Sometimes, a small part of Ken’s speech existed in all spheres, and sometimes it existed in only one. There were topics of conversation that never broached spheres, and some words that were only ever spoken under particular circumstances with particular groups and people.
Ken wondered what would happen if one version of his chatbot entered an unfamiliar sphere. Would it still be recognizable, or would it be mistaken for another person entirely?
——
Odd moments of existential crisis aside, Ken was happy and satisfied with the progress of his chatbot. It had gotten to know him so well it could even reply to random stray messages by reviewing past conversations and comparing them with a web of others to arrive at the best possible voice for a particular person.
It was seamless and beautiful, and Ken found himself suddenly rich with free time. He could now do his work and allow the chatbot to take care of the remaining correspondence while he went to the gym. Afterwards, he played games or read books until heading off to ikebana or French; new pasttimes he’d been able to take up as a result of his recent upgrades.
At midnight each evening, the chatbot sent Ken a report detailing the correspondence that had taken place that day: with whom, what about, and for how long. For the first few weeks these were of great interest to Ken, but over time he began skimming them, and eventually ignored most of them entirely.
Looking at the reports made Ken realize he was little more than a boring person with a boring job, whose personality could be easily reduced to a series of well programmed chatbots.
But Ken tried not to linger on these thoughts for very long.
Instead, he took up pottery.
——
When Mayu appeared at his door one day, Ken was confused.
“What are you doing here?” he said.
“You said I could come.”
“I did?”
“You did. Yesterday.”
Ken looked at his watch. He was going to be late for ikebana.
“This is news to me,” he said.
——
Mayu was Ken’s ex-girlfriend. They had broken up three years ago on bad terms, but not so bad they were beyond sending polite birthday messages to congratulate each others’ continued existence.
When Mayu had sent her most recent birthday message, the chatbot had scanned her chat history with Ken and engaged her in friendly conversation. Because Ken and Mayu’s worst arguments — when they had lived together during the last three months of their relationship — had all taken place in person, their shared chat history was, by comparison, light and fluffy. The chatbot had seen the old messages and concluded that this was how the relationship had always been, and so sent in romance.ken.chatto take care of the rest.
For Mayu, it was as though Ken had turned over a new leaf. He was learning ikebana and French, and he seemed genuinely interested in what she had to say, occasionally adding in well-timed bad jokes and equally bad puns.
This was followed by many nights of simple joy for Mayu and romance.ken.chat. It was like polishing a nostalgic feeling of past-love until it felt like something shiny and brand new. After a few weeks, Mayu took a deep breath and suggested meeting up sometime. Show me some ikebana, she said. Romance.ken.chat happily agreed, and sent a calendar reminder which the real Ken ignored, assuming it was a bug.
Naturally, Mayu had no idea that from the very beginning, romance.ken.chat had been combing through their shared social media and building a database of common search topics in order to achieve the most optimal level of conversation.
And of course, Ken had no idea, either.
——
After sending a confused Mayu home, Ken checked the chatbot and was shocked to find hundreds of conversations running without him.
The chatbot had somehow grown his correspondence network far, far beyond his expectations.
——
With some digging, Ken realized it had all started with his birthday.
On his birthday, Ken received a flood of messages from friends, family, acquaintances, and other people in his network who were essentially strangers. The chatbot had registered all of these messages as positive and polite conversation starters and — after scanning past interactions, shared friends, and other social media connections — had started conversations with all of them, most of which were still ongoing.
There were too many messages to follow at once, so Ken pulled up a few recent data reports, which had grown into pages and pages of conversations with a host of people he did not always remember and sometimes had little more than a passing relationship with.
Ken looked at some of these conversations and wondered: Am I still the onewriting these messages?
——
As an experiment, Ken met with some of the people his chatbot was talking to, and attended a few parties the chatbot had been invited to and cheerily accepted. On the majority of occasions, he noticed the same results: a feeling like vague disappointment and subtle confusion.
It was something of a conundrum: people knew he was Ken, but he was no longer the Ken they knew. At one party, Ken could not tell if the girl he met had been talking to romance.ken.chat or social.ken.chat, or whether she was still on the level of polite.ken.chat. And it was like this all the time; a feeling of incongruence like being unable to identify colors that were once entirely natural.
Without sufficient information, Ken was unsure which Ken he was supposed to be with which person, and soon realized that in order to keep up with the relationships his chatbot had created, he would need to study those relationships and what had taken place in them.
At home, poring over the many hundreds of novel-length chat logs that told the story of a hundred different Kens with a hundred different people, Ken wondered what he would prefer: learning to be the right Ken for the right person, or just going to ikebana in the afternoon.
——
Ken spent the next few days disconnected, reading through conversations and marking them as ‘continue’, ‘end’, or ‘investigate’.
As Ken read, he realized his chatbot had evolved something of a unique personality. At some point in time, the amount of text created by the chatbot outweighed the amount created by the original Ken, and its messages — its personality — had started to skew positive.
The new Ken was an enthusiastic and energetic guy who liked making bad jokes and truly enjoyed the stories he was told. He knew how to flirt, was knowledgeable and considerate, and asked interesting questions to inspire thought and encourage deeper conversation. He was, unfortunately, not much like the real Ken at all, but people seemed to like him better than the old model, which gave Ken pause.
Who am I, he thought, and who do I want to be?
——
After much thought and deliberation, Ken uninstalled the chatbot, along with many of the applications he had used to stay connected. He also cleaned out his contacts and address book, realizing that he was, in the end, too lazy to maintain the facade created by the chatbot.
And so, Ken found himself left with only a small group of people, and among them a girl he still owed an apology to.
——
Ken’s apology to Mayu did not go well. It went about as well as their break-up, which is to say, badly. Mayu was angry with Ken for playing with her feelings — however unintentionally — and left in a huff, half of her embarrassed to have fallen in love with a chatbot, and the other half thinking she should have known better.
Many of Ken’s online friends did not change much, though some felt slighted that Ken would choose to ignore their relationships in favor of pottery, and these relationships eventually faded into the ether.
Ken’s family were mostly forgiving; they knew Ken was the weird one, and understood that if anyone in the family was going to use a chatbot to maintain the family status quo, it was him. Still, it was hard to forgive him for letting his uncle’s death go completely unnoticed, and harder still to accept that the new rock of the family was not Ken himself, but family.ken.chat.
Contrary to expectations, however, breaking and losing relationships made Ken feel good. He felt lighter, somehow. Fluffy, even.
It was a feeling like things returning to normal.
——
Later, Ken sat by himself at a cafe, sipping at coffee and reading a book while his thoughts swam in a pool of blooming flower arrangements.
He had come to like these moments; empty and disconnected, like a lonely island far, far away from the bustling city of text messages, emails, and online communication that was his daily life.
Ken’s life now was less about being time efficient, and more about making better use of the time he had available, which sometimes included generous and luxurious hours of nothing at all. And as far as Ken could tell, even with the constant expansion of technological advancement, this was no longer a task he could outsource, or make more efficient, or pass off to a well-programmed chatbot.
And in any case, he didn’t much want to.
— -
Music
(Mitsume — Kiri no Naka)
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— Hengtee